


His sun

by kate_the_reader



Series: His sun [1]
Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Aziraphale is an artist, Hidden Talents, M/M, POV Aziraphale (Good Omens), POV Crowley (Good Omens), Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-08
Updated: 2019-09-08
Packaged: 2020-10-12 20:24:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20570348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kate_the_reader/pseuds/kate_the_reader
Summary: Aziraphale has a talent Crowley knew nothing about — he draws ... Crowley. He always has. Crowley has complicated feelings when he finds out.





	1. Aziraphale

**Author's Note:**

> Very many thanks are due to my dear friends mycitruspocket and MsBrightsideSH who watched over me as I wrote this and whose interest and love helped make it into what it became.
> 
> There is a scene referred to in this story that occurs in Kate_Lear's truly magnificent fic [Long Is The Way And Hard](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19345675/chapters/46022983). I have footnoted the specific scene.
> 
> In this regard, I really like this tweet by Michael Sheen, which captures a lot of the way fic works, and is particularly apt for this fic:  
__  
"Endlessly multiplying branches of one ever-growing storytree where it becomes impossible to tell where one story ends and another begins when all overlap with each other and appear momentarily in each other's stories like the tree is dreaming itself."

He has always drawn Crowley.

He has wanted, even needed, to keep his image, to keep something of him, something to remind him. Not that he would forget Crowley, could forget him, but each image is a snatched moment, fixing his changeable nature, hoarding it away, something to keep close through all the long years when they do not see each other.

At first, he sketched with his finger in the dust, the image fleeting. He erased it himself, with the side of his hand, guilty. No graven images, no idols, worship is for God alone.

But he drew it again, with a stick in another patch of dust, and again, in the drying mud of a river bank. And erased it, the toe of his sandal hurriedly smearing it.

He could not forget Crowley, but it became harder to have to erase him, to efface his image and keep him in his mind alone. He rebelled against the stricture. The humans were making images, on walls, and to carry with them. The rules of Heaven are different: narrower, harder, but the longer he was in the world, among the humans, with all their ingenuity, all their tenderness, the more he longed to have some of what they had, little things, small rebellions.

Because he wanted to keep Crowley near, in all his changeability.

Each time they met, Crowley was different, his hair once long, now short; his very form fluid, changeable, the form of a human man, now that of a woman.

Each new style, each new form demanded to be recorded, added to all those that came before.

As the years, the decades, the centuries, the millennia rolled inexorably on, he became more skilled at fixing Crowley’s image. He observed, he learnt, he honed his art. He sometimes wished to be able to veil his eyes as Crowley did. To observe, unobserved, to see, unseen, the better to fix his image later. 

He never drew Crowley with his eyes hidden. His eyes were the one unchanging part of him, immutable.

Crowley’s eyes were what had stayed most vivid in his own mind’s eye, after their first meeting on the Wall. The flare of interest in those yellow eyes. He should have averted his gaze, looked away, refused to meet the challenge of the hellish golden irises. He did not.

The first time Crowley had appeared with his eyes hidden, a wave of disappointment had washed over him. To sit in a tavern, drinking, eating, talking, listening to him and be denied those windows to his thoughts, to his mind! It was hardly to be borne.

He had stripped them away in the image he etched into the tabula’s wax surface after they had parted in the Roman street. And felt guilt. Not at drawing an image, he had long since abandoned that guilt, but at denying Crowley his hiding place. He had warred with himself, but he had not relented. Yet another rebellion. But Crowley would never know about the images. He was able to keep very few of them himself. Ink was not always to be had, but there was always a stick in the dust, a burnt twig on a smooth wall, a bit of papyrus — treasured, kept safe for decades until it fell quite apart. He could still recall the image he had drawn on that scrap, every line, every smudge, every crease. The way his skill had failed, his hand had trembled, causing the quill to skid across the surface.

In truth, he never forgot even one of them, just as he never forgot any detail of Crowley himself. 

Besides, having them was less important than drawing them — sitting alone after Crowley had left him and bringing him back, even if only fleetingly. It was the act of creation — which had felt so blasphemous, at first, angels were not made to create — it was the act of creation he loved, the total absorption in contemplating Crowley, considering just what it was that he’d changed this time, what was new, overlaying the unchanging essence. 

The unchanging essence that lived in his eyes.

Over time, although he kept his eyes hidden more and more while in the world among humans, Crowley would sometimes abandon the glasses when they were alone. He always thrilled at that moment, the moment when Crowley removed the glasses, or simply lowered them. The moment he let his sun shine forth. It was not always easy to meet that gaze, to feel the weight of it, the warmth in it, the light of interest flaring there, just like the first time. And even though in those moments it was Crowley revealing more of himself, stripping his defences, lowering his guard, Aziraphale was always left feeling defenceless himself, laid bare and vulnerable. How foolish he was! Crowley could always see him just as he was, there was no hiding from those eyes, veiled or not.

With the unfolding of human history, more and more of them had begun to draw, to paint: images of men and of angels (and of demons). Books of them, psalters richly decorated in red and green, blue and gold. The skill of the men who laboured over them, months of care, all for the glory of God, astounded Aziraphale. If only he had those colours, what an image he would capture, though not for the glory of God, he admitted. If he had a touch of that gold leaf, how Crowley’s eyes would gleam.

He joined an abbey famous for its books, all for the chance to learn that art. He apprenticed in the scriptorium, delighted in the long hours honing his skill with the inks and paints. And yes, he filched the dregs of pots of ink, the tiniest flakes of gold leaf, pushing his guilt down. Hoarded them until he obtained a bit of vellum, cast aside because of a flaw. Kept them safe from the prying eyes of brother monks, the tattling tongues of the less brotherly, until a day when he was alone in the scriptorium pretending to finish copying a book — that day, he had sat at the writing desk upon which the clearest light fell, and he had captured the image of Crowley as he had last seen him.

Crowley’s hair had sprung from his pen in curls of red ink. He had willed his hand not to tremble as he stroked his limbs in long lines of black. And he had laid the flakes of leaf into Crowley’s eyes, twin suns, shining at last in an image as they always did in his mind.

He had kept that image, carefully rolled in a strip of linen, tucked safe within his habit — over his heart— and he had taken it with him when his time in the abbey was done. 

He was proud of that image (another sin), but it had paled before the reality the next time he had seen Crowley. His skill was still unequal to the task. No gold leaf, however beautiful, could convey the interest in those eyes, the intelligence; could capture the longing Crowley sometimes allowed him to see. Longing for what he had lost, for what had been ripped away from him, no doubt. Oh, he knew Crowley sought him out, sometimes, that was only natural. Two immortal beings, trapped among humans with such fleeting lives, of course they would seek each other’s company. But they never spoke of desires, how could they? An angel, sinning by keeping company with a demon, sinning by making images of that demon, sinning by wanting to keep him close? So many sins, and yet he kept on sinning, and he did not feel defiled.

When the humans had invented printing, and books were in reach of more than just the very wealthy, Aziraphale finally had safe places to keep Crowley near. The blank pages at the back of some volumes were too tempting to resist, for an angel so used to small sins. Besides, adding an image of one so beloved — he finally admitted to himself — was hardly defacing a book. Knowing that he had hidden something so precious within only made those volumes more treasured. 

He gathered more and more books, until the only sensible course was to open a shop, a place large enough to at least store them, and sometimes, sell one to someone who seemed truly in need. He kept his most precious volumes among the others, because he knew each of them at a glance, knew just which Crowley lay within each one, and those would never be sold.


	2. Crowley

He loved Aziraphale’s bookshop; had loved it from the day he opened it.

A refuge from the busy, chaotic world (made busier and more chaotic by his own devices, but still, _too much_ sometimes).

And the bookshop was where Aziraphale was.

He had known from the very beginning, since that day on the Wall, that he would never meet another being who could intrigue him so completely. And the delicious, agonising secret was that so few would ever suspect a creature such as himself — a maker of mischief, a creator of chaos — could become completely devoted to one so anxious to do good. What they didn’t see was that Aziraphale was fundamentally as bad as Crowley at following the rules, although not as nonchalant about breaking them. He cut straight through to the essentials. A flaming sword in his hand? Someone in need? He didn’t even stop to think, he just did right as he saw it. Heaven didn’t deserve him. But then, neither did Crowley. He didn’t deserve him, but the angel seemed to like him well enough, to be pleased to see him when he sauntered into his orbit from time to time. To be honest (and honesty was not something he granted to many), he took to sauntering in more and more often, until finally he gave up the pretence and settled down in London, near enough to make dropping into the bookshop an almost daily habit.

The bookshop was still, the silence broken only by the sounds of Aziraphale bustling about — his busyness soothing, unlike the busyness outside — humming to himself as he dusted, running his fingers gently over the spines of the volumes. Did he smile with particular fondness at some of them? Did his hand linger on one or two longer than on others? The small sounds were soothing, the way the light fell through dancing dust motes defined peacefulness. They didn’t even speak, often, and Crowley could drowse in a comfortable armchair tucked among the shelves and feel … at home, at rest, safe, cocooned.

But you can only drowse for so long, the mind needs something to grasp onto. Crowley remembered which books Aziraphale seemed to love especially, and one day he pulled one from its shelf. _Hamlet_. He should have guessed. He opened it, flipping through the pages, eyes caught by scenes he remembered only too well. Scenes that brought back sitting in a stall in Shakespeare’s theatre, dragged there by Aziraphale to see the outcome of his little angel-pleasing miracle. Watching Aziraphale watching the actors, how he’d turned to Crowley at lines that pleased him especially. How he’d said afterwards, as they walked out among the throng: “Thank you, my dear!” 

Crowley smiled as he paged, until he turned over the very last page. And found himself looking up from the paper.

The portrait was sketched in black ink, faded to brown. His hair was long, that ridiculous beard springing from his lip. And his eyes were uncovered, slitted pupils clearly visible. Who could Aziraphale have got to draw him? Why would he deface one of his beloved books like this? How could he tell the artist to sketch his hellish eyes?

Crowley snapped the book shut and jammed it back on the shelf and stalked out of the shop, his skin prickling with discomfort. He was halfway home before he realised he’d forgotten the Bentley, and became aware of the disorder he was trailing behind him: pedestrians bumping into each other, jostling without apologies, stepping out in front of cars, causing drivers to screech to a halt and shout from their windows, cursing and waving their fists. He couldn’t go back, so he walked on, slamming into his flat and causing all the plants to quiver and shrink.

He flung himself into his silly throne, gilded carvings digging into his back. It was inexplicable, incredible. Why? Why? Why?

He avoided the bookshop for as long as he could, until a note was slipped under his door, a note on heavy cream paper, in Aziraphale’s flamboyant hand.

“My dear,” it said, “Did you go away? The shop misses you. I miss you.”

He stood looking at the note, his vision blurring, and then he crumpled it and flung it into a corner. From where he retrieved it a minute later. He smoothed it on the counter. “Angel,” he muttered, turning to leave.

Aziraphale’s shop was just as peaceful as ever. Crowley had missed it. Had missed _him_, of course. Long ago, he used to be able to stay away much longer, when he didn’t know him so well, now there was so much to miss, so much _Aziraphaleness _to feel bereft of. So he stayed, settled into the armchair and allowed himself to drowse while Aziraphale pottered.

He didn’t mention finding the drawing.

He waited as long as he could, after he came back, but he couldn’t stop himself from giving in to the temptation to look inside other books Aziraphale seemed especially fond of. 

A volume of Oscar Wilde stories. He flipped straight to the back and there he was, in watercolours this time, yellow eyes staring. He swallowed and forced himself to look carefully. 

He remembered finding Aziraphale among the crowd outside a law court*, weeping for this writer whom Crowley had always assumed was on _his _side. Was this a reminder to Aziraphale of that day? Crowley hadn’t given him anything, there was nothing to give, no little miracle to change the course of that fate. He looked again, more closely, at the image. Perhaps he was imagining more than the artist had actually portrayed if he saw sympathy in his yellow eyes.

Whoever the artist was, they were bloody good. Too bloody good. Too bloody good at seeing right _into _him.

He looked as long as he could bear, but looking at himself with his defences down was too unsettling. Why would Aziraphale want these pictures added to his beloved books? And why with his demon eyes uncovered? Of course he let down his guard around him sometimes, how could you not, with someone you’d known almost since time began, but why would he want to look at them when he didn’t have to? The glasses made it possible to move among the humans, but they also spared his angel. 

“Crowley? My dear…?” Aziraphale’s voice followed him to the door.

“I’ve got to … I forgot …” he gestured vaguely at a missed appointment.

“Oh. Of course.”

He couldn’t bear to look back at the puzzled frown he could hear. Got into the Bentley and drove far too fast, almost knocking a parking ticket warden off her feet (she took it out on a Rolls-Royce in front of the Ritz).

He couldn’t stay away for more than a few days that time. 

When he did go back, he made a determined search of the place, looking for further evidence, walking up and down the rows of bookcases, trusting his senses to lead him to another defaced book. When he spied the battered paperback it was so incongruous he had to take it down out of sheer curiosity. Ursula K. Le Guin. _City of Illusions_.** With a terrible painting of a yellow-eyed man on the cover. His lip curled as he opened it — and then he saw the publication date printed at the front: 1967. A wave of misery washed over him and he stuffed it back on the shelf so hard the whole thing threatened to topple. The glass in the door almost shattered as he left the shop and right in front of him, a man started shouting at his girlfriend.

Uprooting a blameless orchid at home didn’t make him feel any better, though. He would have to face the picture he knew was there or it would eat at him. But he couldn’t bear to look with Aziraphale in the shop, spreading calm and warmth. He watched from an alley opposite until he left, patting his pockets and looking up at the thunder-threatening sky, and then hurrying off, an umbrella swinging at his side. 

He let himself in and went straight to the shelf. Plucked the book down and closed his eyes as he opened the back cover. His breath shook as he forced himself to look at what he knew he would see, hearing the words that had haunted him for decades. The picture was done in bright paints, on a card stuck into the back cover. The coloured lights he remembered illuminating Aziraphale’s hair were reflected in his own serpent eyes.

It wasn’t until he was caught in a jam on the M25 that he could bring himself to think of that picture. To think of that evening, when Aziraphale had finally given him what he asked for, even though it terrified him; had given him that, and then denied him what he really wanted. 

He closed his eyes and saw the picture again — the neon lights, the busy street outside, and inside the car, Crowley, with all the desperate pleading he had thought he hadn’t allowed to show, etched on his face and in his hungry eyes. 

The crunch of his bumper hitting the car in front brought him back.

When he’d seen the first picture, he’d thought that perhaps Aziraphale had unveiled his eyes to remind himself that Crowley — despite all their millennia of association, despite their Arrangement, despite the fact that he sometimes seemed to light up when Crowley happened to drop by — was a Demon.

When he had seen the second picture, he had been forced to admit that Aziraphale (because of course he knew it was Aziraphale drawing them) was doing something else with his book defacing; Aziraphale, who took such care of his things — Crowley’s mouth had pursed on a remembered breath, and he had smiled at a puff of blue lifting from a much-loved jacket; and at Aziraphale’s never-to-be-forgotten delight. But even if it seemed Aziraphale was preserving something inside his beloved books — of course it was the clever angel making these pictures, how could he ever have wondered? — Crowley still had not understood why he would want the eyes; why he would strip him of his protection.

The evidence of the third picture was too maddening to consider head on. He pulled out suddenly to pass a lorry, and left a 20-car pile-up in his wake. It didn’t calm his nerves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *This is the scene created by Kate_Lear in [Long Is The Way And Hard](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19345675/chapters/46022983).  
**[This is the book, and the cover](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Illusions)
> 
> There is also a wonderful podfic of [Long Is The Way And Hard](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20017855/chapters/47399098), read by podfixx, who is fantastic


	3. Aziraphale and Crowley

Afterwards, once they’ve caught their breaths, calmed their hearts, once they’ve survived everything, survived the worst, survived the fear, not of ceasing to exist, but of continuing to exist while the other did not, then, as they move from their long struggle to … the rest, to everything they have dreamed of, have promised and half promised and hardly dared to hope for, then, they have to learn everything again.

Afterwards, when Aziraphale admits that they are on their own side; afterwards, when Crowley looks at Aziraphale like that, as he has looked before, across other tables in other times and other places, but somehow more, somehow different. Afterwards.

*

Afterwards, as they walk through the bookshop, which he had mourned the loss of — amidst everything else it had seemed wrong to mourn for it, but he had — Aziraphale’s steps turn almost without conscious will towards a shelf that holds particular treasure. It is there, among the other plays, and his hand moves towards it. But Crowley is standing right beside him, so he forces his hand back down. 

“I know.” Crowley’s voice in his ear is very low, rough.

“You know?”

“Angel,” says Crowley patiently, tilting his head as Aziraphale turns to look at him. “I know. I saw. But tell me why?”

“Why?” Crowley has taken the book down and he hands it to Aziraphale. “Why I drew you? I have always drawn you. Since the beginning. I wanted to keep you …” He opens the book at the picture. He thinks about drawing it, one of the first he’d been able to keep safe inside a book. “I couldn’t save them at first. The ones I drew in the dust, in a patch of mud, on a wall.” 

“In a patch of mud?”

He nods as his finger traces the lines of faded ink on the paper. He looks up at Crowley, still hidden behind his glasses. “May I see you, my dear?”

Crowley stands frozen, shoulders stiff, hands jammed into his pockets. Aziraphale reaches up. “May I?” He stills his hand near Crowley’s temple and waits. Hopes for permission. Crowley nods, a tiny movement. He swallows audibly, his long throat working, and Aziraphale lifts the glasses from his face, from his eyes. “Crowley?” he asks, and Crowley opens his eyes: twin suns. It is not the first time, but it feels different. It feels new. He dares to touch, just the back of his fingers to Crowley’s cheek, a slow slide down.

“Why?” asks Crowley, again. “Why the _eyes_?”

“Don’t you know, my dear?” Crowley shakes his head, turns his face away. Aziraphale reaches up again, his fingers on Crowley’s jaw, and brings him back so they are looking into each other’s eyes again. “Because no other being had ever looked at me the way you looked at me, that first day.” He watches emotions chasing each other in Crowley’s eyes. “It was like the sun,” he says. “Like the sun shining for me alone.”

“Angel,” Crowley breathes, as tears overflow his eyes and he turns away again, blinking. Aziraphale stands silent. He holds the glasses out, but Crowley shakes his head, tears shining on his face. Aziraphale looks down at the book, still lying open on his palm. A tear has fallen on the page and the ancient ink comes alive and spreads, cloudy. He touches his fingertip to it. A bit of Crowley himself is now part of the picture forever.

“Oh,” says Crowley, pulling a hand from his pocket and rubbing at his eyes. “I’m so sorry, Aziraphale. Let me fix that.”

Aziraphale moves the book away. “Fix it? There’s nothing to fix.” He closes it gently and returns it to its place on the shelf.

“Come, my dear,” he says. “Come and sit with me.” He leads him to the armchair he has always seemed so at home in. “Rest, Crowley.” 

Crowley pulls up his legs, curls himself into the chair and closes his eyes. He has not put the glasses back on. Aziraphale pulls another chair nearer so he can … keep Crowley company? watch over him? He’s not sure, only that he needs to be near.

As he watches, he wonders. How many portraits had Crowley found? And why did he never mention them? Well, he thinks he knows why. The same reason he has only recently been able to admit to himself what he has known for decades. Decades, such a short time, for them, but so long, too. He knows which picture he wants Crowley to see more than any of the others.

*

When Crowley wakes, the shop is dim, lit only by a few lamps. Aziraphale has fallen asleep himself, his head lolling to the side, but his hands still neatly folded in his lap. Warmth suffuses Crowley’s whole being; he can feel his face going soft. He unfolds his legs and leans forward, closing the small space between their two chairs, and touches Aziraphale’s knee. He’s not trying to wake him, just to feel their connection, because surely now they can have this? Can admit they have this? Aziraphale stirs, smiles at him. “Crowley?”

“I’m going to go,” he says. “Plants,” he says, “Need water …” He trails off. There’s so much he wants to say, but he can’t tonight.

A small frown creases Aziraphale’s brow. “I’ll come back in the morning,” Crowley says, “Can’t sleep in a chair.”

Aziraphale allows him the lie. 

“Don’t get up,” says Crowley. 

“Thank you,” he says, with his hand on the door latch, too quietly for Aziraphale to hear, he thinks. 

“Thank you,” he says as he walks towards the Bentley. 

“Thank you,” he says as he walks among his plants. 

“Thank you,” he says as he lies in bed.

“Angel,” he says as he pushes the shop door open the next morning, rather earlier than he has arrived before. The shop is empty. “Angel?”

Aziraphale’s voice floats down the stairs: “Crowley? Crowley!” He will never tire of hearing his name in Aziraphale’s voice. He wonders if Aziraphale feels the same. He leans against the counter, forcing himself to wait.

Aziraphale walks in from the stairwell. He is not wearing a jacket. He is not wearing a tie. His collar is not fastened. 

“Crowley? What is it, my dear?” Aziraphale comes to stand directly in front of him. “Are you unwell?”

“_Breathe_,” he reminds himself. “_Move_.”

He swallows. “No, I’m …” He can’t say “_fine_”. He can’t tell that lie. “Aziraphale,” he finally manages, his voice grating in his throat.

“Oh, my dear,” says Aziraphale, stepping closer.

Crowley has forgotten to take off his glasses. He meant to take them off, for Aziraphale, but his brain stopped working. He reaches up now and takes them off, and Aziraphale’s worried frown is replaced by a beaming smile. He drops his eyes and looks up again at Crowley. Crowley has been withstanding that look for centuries, but his resolve is going to crack soon. He drops his own eyes, to the tiny, flushed vee of throat revealed by Aziraphale’s open collar. And looks up again quickly. If he could, he’d take a step away, but he’s backed up against the counter. Aziraphale’s hand flutters at his side and then he relents and turns away. 

“Coffee?”

_How can he be so unaffected?_

“Yes. Please. Coffee. Good idea. Coffee.”

“I’ll just go and make it, shall I? And finish dressing. Will you come up?”

“Er. Um. I’ll just …” He waves a hand vaguely.

“I’ll bring it down.” Aziraphale half turns at the bottom of the stairs, but he doesn’t say anything more.

Crowley wants to say: “No, don’t finish dressing! Never do up your collar again!” But of course he can’t say that. _Look at yourself, resisting temptation._

He’s still standing at the counter when Aziraphale comes back carrying a tray with a steaming espresso pot and two cups. He has a tie on. Of course he does.

“There,” he says, pouring and handing Crowley a cup. “Strong and black, just as you like it.”

“Yes, strong and black. Thank you.” Crowley’s hand hardly shakes as he takes the cup.

They drink in silence and he accepts a second cup, but then the coffee is finished and he can’t put it off any longer.

“I saw other pictures,” he blurts. “There seemed to be books you were fonder of. So I saw other pictures.”

“You noticed?”

“Of course I noticed, angel!” He speaking too fast, his words sliding together, his voice too loud. 

“When you told me the shop was gone,” says Aziraphale, “I mourned some books more than others.” He’s not smiling as he looks steadily at Crowley. “Would you show me another that you found?”

He can’t show the one in the paperback. Not yet.

“There’s one in an Oscar Wilde.”

“Yes,” says Aziraphale, and his smile is a little sad. He moves towards the shelf, and Crowley follows. Aziraphale reaches up and takes down the book, _The Happy Prince and Other Tales._

He strokes the cover gently and then opens the book from the back. “That was a terrible day,” he says. “That poor man.”

“I always thought he was on my side,” says Crowley, to cover his nerves.

“He was on _our _side,” says Aziraphale. He touches the little painting. “You were very kind to me, Crowley.”

“Well,” Crowley tries to shrug, “of course.” But he can’t be nonchalant. “You were in _pain_.”

“I was.”

“Why recall it then?”

“Because of what you gave me.”

Crowley can hardly breathe, but he forces himself to continue. “Is that what you were doing? Marking the times I gave you something?”

“Not always. Mostly. You have given me so much, all this time.”

“Not always.” He knows at least one picture that has nothing to do with him giving Aziraphale something. If he shows it to him, he’ll have shown all those he had time to find. He doesn’t want to see it again, and he wonders if Aziraphale will want to. He walks towards the shelf where he found it, the book's creased paperback spine incongruous among the other sober bindings. Aziraphale follows, and when he sees the book Crowley is reaching for, he gasps, a soft little “Oh!”. Crowley pulls the book free and smooths the corner that apparently got bent when he pushed it so roughly back into place before. But he doesn’t open it.

Aziraphale touches the back of the hand holding the book, so they are both holding it, together. He’s biting his lip, his brows knitted together with worry. It’s so like the first time they ever met that Crowley almost drops the book.

“Not always,” says Aziraphale. “That was a time when I—”

“Gave _me _something?”

“When I withheld … I’ve regretted that so long. As soon as I said it.” Aziraphale’s eyes are filled with tears. “I was afraid,” he says. “I was so afraid. Forgive me, Crowley.”

Crowley steps forward, lifts his hand, and Aziraphale closes the space between them, crowding right up to him, leaning against him. He folds his arm around Aziraphale’s shoulders. “Angel.”

Their hands are still joined on the book, until Aziraphale brings that hand up to Crowley’s face, stroking so lightly with the back of his fingers, as he did the day before. “Crowley,” he says with infinite tenderness.

Crowley mirrors his gesture, brushing his thumb under Aziraphale’s eyes to dry the tears. “Angel. Of course I forgave you.”

They stand there clinging together a long, long time.

*

There’s one more picture he especially wants Crowley to see, but his nerve fails him.

They had held each other a long, long time after not looking at the picture from 1967. Neither of them gets physically tired, but he, and he feels sure, Crowley, is emotionally exhausted. Eventually, they had parted, he bending to retrieve the fallen book and return it to its place, and he had led Crowley back to the armchair he loves and Crowley had curled himself into it, and looked up at Aziraphale and said: “Stay here?” and he had nodded, and sat down in his own chair and watched Crowley sleep. He could watch Crowley sleep every day and every night until the end of time.

Eventually, he forces himself to get up and find the picture. It’s not drawn into a book. There had been so few books published then, with the wartime lack of paper. He shudders to recall those terrible years.

The picture is drawn in pencil on the kind of rough, greyish paper that was to be had then. He could have miracled some better paper, but that would have been an iniquitous waste of grace. And besides, he has always used the kind of human supplies available, although he’s not sure why he made that a rule.

He considers for a moment before fetching a pen and writing what he needs to say on the back of the folded picture. That way, it will always be a part of it.

“My dearest,” he writes, “It is true that I mostly kept those times you gave me, so generously, what I asked for, and what I needed even when I did not ask. This is one of those times, but it is also when I understood completely …” He goes back and underlines it: “completely that you loved me. And that I not only loved you (I have always loved you, even when that may not have been clear) but that I was, as people say, in love with you. In a church during the Blitz.” 

He reads it over. It seems so inadequate to express the depth and breadth of what he feels, but he wants Crowley to have it. “Yours ever, A” He frowns at that and crosses it out. “Forever yours,” he writes instead.

He turns the picture over. The ink has bled through the paper a little, but the look in Crowley’s eyes as he stands holding the bag of books is clear. He folds it again, leans across to where Crowley is still asleep and places it on the chair’s arm, where he will see it when he wakes. And then he gets up and fetches a duster and busies himself among his books.

*

Crowley wakes slowly and stays curled in the chair, because Aziraphale is humming as he bustles about the shop and that is his favourite sound in all the world. Eventually though, he sits up and stretches, knocking a piece of paper off the arm of the chair. He gets down on his knees to retrieve it from where it’s landed under a shelf and sits back down to look at it. It is soft, greyish paper, folded over. Something is written on it. Aziraphale has written something on it, but it must be more than a note, because that would be folded with the writing inside. He realises that this line of speculation is a delaying tactic and wonders why he is nervous to look, now that he thinks he understands Aziraphale’s pictures. He shakes himself. Should he look at the picture, or read the note first? Picture. That probably came first. He opens the paper.

The pencil drawing sends him straight back to that church in the Blitz, when he had rescued Aziraphale and saved a bag of his books. There he is, eyes shaded by his hat, but still clearly visible, holding the bag, holding it out to Aziraphale.

He turns the paper over to read what Aziraphale has written.

He’s still sitting there, smoothing the paper on his knee, gazing at the words, tracing “Forever yours” with a trembling finger, when Aziraphale comes around a bookcase.

“Crowley?” he says, his voice gentle.

Crowley waves the paper weakly at him and tries to speak.

“My dear. Dearest.” Aziraphale’s voice is sticking in his throat too. 

Crowley reaches for his hand and tugs him closer. “Forever yours,” he finally manages. 

Aziraphale nods and Crowley pulls his hand towards his mouth and kisses the palm, turns it over and kisses each knuckle. He looks up at Aziraphale. “Come here?” he asks. 

“Here I am.” Aziraphale sits in Crowley’s lap, turns until he is leaning against him, held in Crowley’s arms, and touches his fingers lightly to his mouth. “Here I am, my dearest. My love.”

Crowley feels as if his heart might crash through the wall of his chest. “Forever yours,” he says again. “Yes. Forever yours.” He holds Aziraphale’s hand to his face.

They sit like that a long, long time as the light fades and day turns to evening in the bookshop. 

At last, Aziraphale lifts his head from Crowley’s shoulder — _too soon! _— and shifts his hand, which Crowley has not released. But he isn’t pulling away. His fingers find Crowley’s lips again, a delicate touch, and he drops his eyes from Crowley’s eyes, and leans in and kisses him, a light press of his lips to Crowley’s mouth. 

Crowley has dreamed of this for centuries. 

The reality is nothing like he has imagined. Aziraphale’s kiss is sweet and tender, a question and an answer, a completion and a promise. 

He lifts his own hand and lays it on Aziraphale’s cheek, draws it slowly down, and dares to kiss him in return. Crowley has imagined hunger, but he finds that he is satisfied.

Aziraphale sighs. “Crowley.”

He has heard his name in Aziraphale’s voice for millennia and it has never sounded quite like this — as if Aziraphale has found his true home after a long and difficult journey. He hopes Aziraphale hears the same in his voice: “Angel.”


End file.
